{"id":281,"date":"2015-12-30T16:47:58","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T21:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=281"},"modified":"2017-08-21T18:13:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T22:13:38","slug":"a-darker-side-of-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/a-darker-side-of-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"A Darker Side of Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions\u2014often referred to as Richard Nixon\u2019s \u201cSouthern strategy\u201d\u2014that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party<\/a>. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use \u201cdog whistle politics\u201d<\/a>\u2014racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.\n

There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that<\/a> participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed\u00a0that<\/a>, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.<\/p>\n

There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama\u2019s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign was accused<\/a> of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it\u2019s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig<\/a> and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.<\/p>\n

Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged<\/a>. Obama\u2019s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity\u2014see example below\u2014than in all other images of Obama.<\/p>\n